Dynamic simulation of the temperature field of stainless steel laser welding

The distribution of the temperature field in laser welding based on stainless steel 304 sheet was dynamically simulated by the FEA software – ANSYS in this paper. In view of the characters of laser welding, a travel heat source combined with the body loads was designed by analyzing both the temperature relativity of the thermal physical parameters of material and latent heat of fusion and the effect of convection radiation on temperature field. Considering the high nonlinear of the laser welding process, the transition element modeling was adopted. During load history, a residue control method was taken to ensure the precision of node selection. Through the calculation, it was shown that the simulation results of weld shape were in accordance with the experimental results.